Kindred of the Dust eBook

“What a woman!” he reflected. “Brains,
imagination, dignity, womanly pride, courage, beauty
and—­yes; I agree with Donald. Neither
maid, wife nor widow is she—­yet she is
not, never has been, and never will be a woman without
virtue. Ah, Donald, my son, she’s a bonny
lass! For all her fall, she’s not a common
woman and my son is not a common man—­I
wonder—­Oh, ’tis lies, lies, lies,
and she’s heard them and knows they’re
lies. Ah, my son, my son, with the hot blood of
youth in you—­you’ve a man’s
head and heart and a will of your own—­Aye,
she’s sweet—­that she is—­I
wonder!”

X

At the front of Caleb Brent’s little house there
was a bench upon which the old man was wont to sit
on sunny days—­usually in the morning, before
the brisk, cool nor’west trade-wind commenced
to blow. Following Hector McKaye’s departure,
Nan sought this bench until she had sufficiently mastered
her emotions to conceal from her father evidence of
a distress more pronounced than usual; as she sat there,
she revolved the situation in her mind, scanning every
aspect of it, weighing carefully every possibility.

In common with the majority of human kind, Nan considered
herself entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, and now, at a period when, in the ordinary
course of events, all three of these necessary concomitants
of successful existence (for, to her, life meant something
more than mere living) should have been hers in bounteous
measure, despite the handicap under which she had been
born, she faced a future so barren that sometimes
the distant boom of the breakers on Tyee Head called
to her to desert her hopeless fight and in the blue
depths out yonder find haven from the tempests of her
soul.

In an elder day, when the Sawdust Pile had been Port
Agnew’s garbage-dump, folks who clipped their
rose bushes and thinned out their marigold plants
had been accustomed to seeing these slips take root
again and bloom on the Sawdust Pile for a brief period
after their ash-cans had been emptied there; and,
though she did not know it, Nan Brent bore pitiful
resemblance to these outcast flowers. Here, on
the reclaimed Sawdust Pile, she had bloomed from girlhood
into lovely womanhood—­a sweet forget-me-not
in the Garden of Life, she had been transplanted into
Eden until Fate, the grim gardener, had cast her out,
to take root again on the Sawdust Pile and ultimately
to wither and die.

It is terrible for the great of soul, the ambitious,
the imaginative, when circumstances condemn them to
life amid dull, uninteresting, drab, and sometimes
sordid surroundings. Born to love and be loved,
Nan Brent’s soul beat against her environment
even as a wild bird, captured and loosed in a room,
beats against the window-pane. From the moment
she had felt within her the vague stirrings of womanhood,
she had been wont to gaze upon the blue-back hills
to the east, to the horizon out west, wondering what